This week I’ve been working on a quilt, sewing by the fire, and thinking. My mind wanders along paths, some expected (travel plans a bit later this month have me figuring out some details) and some sort of unexpected. My mum’s birthday is today. If she was still alive, she’d be turning 98. A few years ago I was impatient for 2026 to arrive because that’s 100 years after her birth and I would finally be able to access her original birth certificate, the one with both her parents’ names on it. She knew it existed but then it disappeared. And although she was reluctant to pursue the search for her birth parents, I have been doing it ever since she died. She had been raised by a foster mother, the one she thought of as her mother, in a household with a much older foster sister and brother. When I first met her foster mother and sister — we were instructed to call them Grandma and Aunt Helen– I knew, even at the age of 8, that they didn’t consider my mother a member of their family. She had a place in the stories they told about her childhood but every one was qualified by her status as a foster child. Don’t you want to know who your parents were, I’d ask her, and she would cry a little and say, I did want to know from time to time but then I’d remember that Grandma Emma was my mother. She raised me after all.
I was impatient for 2026 but in the past few years, little by little, the information about her birth parents has come to me. First there were the DNA matches, the close ones, and there was a pattern to them, leading to a single name: the name of her biological father. I had some correspondence with members of his family and they conceded that it was possible, even likely, that the connection was real. There were dates and places and those lined up. Then in October of 2023, the woman who would have been my mother’s sister-in-law contacted me to tell me of a discovery in an old tin box. A letter from my mother’s biological mother to the man who was my mother’s father. I wrote about this then. And little by little, more information has come my way, mostly thanks to my son Forrest who found my mother on the 1931 census, listed as a “lodger” in her foster mother’s house. He found information about her mother, who was a widow with 4 children when she became pregnant with my mother. I gather she didn’t want anyone to know and so she gave my mother away and had no contact with her for the rest of her life. She remarried and died of cervical cancer at the age of 57. Forrest found obituaries for some of her children, who were of course my mother’s half-sisters and brother. My mother’s father also had two sons so in total she had three half-sisters and 3 half-brothers. She never knew any of this. This, in contrast to my father’s mother, who had 9 children, one of whom died, with her first husband, and after she was widowed, she met my grandfather, with whom she had 2 more children, one of whom died. In my grandfather’s obituary, these children were all listed as his children, and my father considered them his brothers and sisters, no halves about it. My mother was always a bit of an outsider at the gatherings of my father’s family, mostly because they all liked to drink and carouse, and this made her nervous. But I wonder if she simply didn’t know how to be a member of a large and loving family. When she met my father and married him, when the two of them brought 4 children into the world, her family became her whole world.
This week I’ve been working on a quilt, sewing quietly by the fire, listening to the snap of dry fir, and thinking about my mother. What would I tell her, if I could have an hour or so with her now? Would I tell her the whole saga of her mother in a house in Sydney, Cape Breton, with 4 children, waiting for the 5th to be born, hoping to do this unnoticed. There’d been talk of her going to Quebec to have the baby but she didn’t. Instead my mum was born and given away to a widow in Halifax with two children, the older daughter, who always reminded us later that my mother wasn’t a true sister, and a son, who was almost certainly abusive. He did not come to a good end. I think I wouldn’t tell my mum any of the stuff she didn’t know. Who needs to be reminded they were handed over to a woman living in a dark house in Halifax, her status described as “age 5, a lodger” in the 1931 census, and who needs to be reminded her biological parents never sought her out in later years? No, I’d hold her hands and tell her I love her, loved her always, even during those years when we barely talked and she called me ungrateful and I wished I lived a million miles away. Today she’d be 98. Each of her children is still alive, I keep her camphor wood chest in my house with her bottle of My Sin perfume in its box inside. And the path I am sewing, the winding path of blue thread, leading away from the spiral where it began, winding away for too many miles to count on my fingers, leads to her. It always will.
All these years and all these roadsNever led me back to youI’m always five hundred miles away from homeAway from home, away homeAlways out here on my ownI’m still five hundred miles away from homeI’m still five hundred miles away from home
...Theresa Kishkan 